


The Modern Pinocchio

by starsoverhead



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Introspection, POV First Person, Star Trek References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-27
Updated: 2012-07-27
Packaged: 2017-11-10 20:49:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/470544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsoverhead/pseuds/starsoverhead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spencer Reid muses about himself in comparison to two of his favourite Star Trek characters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Modern Pinocchio

**Author's Note:**

> This work contains mentions of bullying and of Diana Reid's mental illness.

I spent my childhood trying to be Data.

I didn’t know it at the time, as I was born before Star Trek: The Next Generation was on the air and I missed a lot of the episodes as I was growing up, but when I could finally sit down during and after college and watch the old VHS bootlegs that my roommates and dormmates had recorded off their TVs at home, I felt something tug at me.

In specific, there’s an episode in the fifth season called Hero Worship. A boy, Timothy, is the only survivor of a starship accident. After he’s beamed onto the Enterprise, he finds himself fascinated by Data - an android who has no human emotion. Of course, as Timothy has just lost his family, the idea of having no emotions is extremely appealing and, at the suggestion of Counselor Troi, the two begin to spend time together.

He tries to make himself into a perfect clone of Data, from uniform to hairstyle and emotionless behaviour. He imitates Data’s tics, both physically and verbally, to the point where even the android has to wonder if he really acts like the boy’s depiction.

The episode resolves when they discover the actual cause of the starship accident. Timothy first claimed it was an alien attack but it’s revealed to be shock waves from a nearby dark cluster. In both cases - the boy’s imitation of Data and the ship being nearly destroyed - the answer was to bring down the shields.

I wasn’t much of a philosopher in college, or I wasn’t until I met Jason Gideon. Instead, I had majored in subjects which were, to me, easy. Mathematics, engineering, and chemistry all deal in absolutes and constants. After meeting Gideon, I began to deal more in theory and hypothesis, the unknowns inside the human mind, and in doing so, I drew more and more parallels between myself and the android second officer of the Enterprise.

Saying that my childhood was terrible makes me feel like I’m seeking attention. It’s true that it wasn’t the best or easiest childhood that anyone could have. I was my mother’s primary caretaker after my father left both of us when I was eight. I weathered her ups and downs, from when I came home to tinfoil crumpled around every lightbulb to waking up to the scent of fresh cinnamon rolls that she’d made from scratch. There were bad days, but there were also good.

I can’t claim the same as it comes to my experiences in public school. I was bullied, picked on, beaten up, and so often, the only thing my teachers would say was ‘boys will be boys.’ Between those incidents and my mother’s spiraling blowouts, I spent a great deal of my life separating myself from what was happening. If I could make myself believe that it wasn’t happening to me, then I could step back to analyse and understand what was happening instead of having to deal with the emotions.

When I started studying psychology, the warnings about self-diagnosing fell on deaf ears. I learned my own issues with trust and abandonment. My professors taught me about dissociation, anxious avoidance, safety behaviours, and escape, and I saw them all in myself. To this day, my favourite holiday is Halloween for the simple reason that I can pretend to be someone else.

But more than anything, I suddenly understood why, out of all of the Star Trek characters I had learned and loved over the years, I found myself most sympathetic to Spock and Data. One had no emotions. The other kept his hidden beneath careful training so they were only rarely shown. When disasters were happening around them, they were the ones who kept a cool head and found a way to save the crew and, at times, the world.

It was hard for me to see this as a bad thing. Staying distant from my emotions had kept me from falling apart under stress and had made me more likely to be able to find my way through any unexpected difficulties that cropped up along the way. I knew I’d never save the world, but maybe I’d somehow manage to save myself.

It didn’t work. Being in the FBI pushed my issues with trust and abandonment and even added to them. Recovering from an addiction, watching my trusted mentor disappear, learning my secrets were no longer secret, and then being lied to - all of it hurt, but there was still one thing that remained in common with the rest of my life. I was still outside the group, looking in at other people who seemed perfectly happy and wondering what was wrong with me that I wasn’t.

One weekend not so long ago, in a session of self-medication that involved hot soup and a Star Trek marathon, I happened to rewatch Hero Worship in the course of watching all of season five of TNG. I watched Timothy take on his android persona, hiding the heartbreaks of the accident he thought he’d caused and the loss of his parents, and I saw myself in him.

I saw all of the days that I stood and watched my mother rage at invisible antagonists. I saw myself using the word “fine” when that was the last thing that I felt. I heard my voice going on and on about details, statistics, and theories that I had memorised on a casual, curious readthrough of some journal or other.

Being unaffected by emotional upheaval made me, I knew, appear to be reliable. It made me strong in the eyes of others, and I had always feared, after my father’s disappearance and years of teasing, being thought of as weak. Not giving in to the teasing and the taunting - or the bitterness that it all had made fester in me - was at highest degree of importance.

As Timothy broke through the android shield he had put around his emotions, I could see the dents that my own had weathered and the cracks that had broken all the way through. But even as I thought that, I wondered if I was really trying to be Data anymore.

I still maintained a distance from my emotions, and I still do. Habits are hard to break, especially when it’s a habit that you’ve held for most of your life. But I wonder, now, if I haven’t somewhat shifted away from Data and toward Spock.

Vulcan culture was once warlike and violent, driven by dangerous emotions. The control they taught themselves, they taught for the sake of necessity. The entire race learned to live the idiom, “Still waters run deep.” Though they project a facade of calm and logical thought, their emotions are deep and vibrant, separate from their thoughts. I’ve had to acknowledge my feelings recently. Moreso than I’ve had to in years. They’re there, and they’re strong.

I remember a conversation held between Spock and Data in Unification II wherein Data mentions that Spock has eschewed everything Data has always aspired to be. In that, I know I’m more Data than Spock and probably always will be. My shields are still partially up. I’m not an android anymore, but I’m also not quite ready to be human yet. I just wonder if Counselor Troi would be proud of my progress.


End file.
